oh, take me back to the start
by ten.years.only.with.you
Summary: The world before her bows in thanksgiving. The human in him purrs, the beast in him roars. damon/elena


[pilot]

He can't get close enough to see all that he wants of her chestnut brown hair, sandalwood skin, and cocoa bean eyes. But, even from this distance, he can tell that when she smiles, the universe bows in thanksgiving. The human in him purrs, the beast in him roars.

[night of the comet]

"I can see why my brother is so smitten," he tells the beauty in front of him, her hot breath fanning across his cheeks as a light coral strikes the apple of her face.

I can't see how he _couldn't _be, Damon thinks, when she verbally spars better than half the women he's met in a century.

[friday night bites]

When she apologizes, slender tan fingers wrapped strongly around a buttercream dinner plate, cocoa eyes brimming with empathy, he knows she means it, and his own sky lit orbs soften at the sound of her words.

Stefan shouts accusations and daggers lies into his aged smirk, faltering with every last sentence his brother spits like vervain on the flesh. No humanity, he scoffs to himself as he drains the history teacher of every last drop of blood, tossing the body aside, chuckling as the corroded artery spills a warm pool on the September skin of the high school parking lot. Victory slips by the wayside. Katherine's name floats in the humid air between brothers, the past akin to alcohol swiping onto an already open wound.

Like a thief in the night, he sneaks into her chamber, and listens to the pumping of her blood, the steady rhythm of her heart beating alive in her breast, without hesitation fingers her chestnut hair, and wonders with the quickest of preponderances what she would do if she awoke and saw a man (_this _man) standing before her with absent kindness in his eyes and a half bruised heart.

Would she even notice the laugh line faded into his brow or the knots of a hundred and so odd years of worrying carved into his back. Or would she just scream?

[family ties]

She's been in the middle before either of them knew it. If there is anything Both Salvatore men know that it all comes down to the love of a woman.

[you're undead to me]

Back sweaty and sticky against the cool tiles of the locked cellar, he tries to remember how to inhale and exhale. "I can keep you from hurting anyone else," his brother tells him, bottle green eyes set far back with determination, not a tick of laughter present in his sculpted cheekbones.

Damon knows what he really means: "I can keep you from hurting _her_."

[lost girls]

"I've been in love. It's painful, pointless, and overrated," he drawls, lifting a bottle of bourbon aged three times her span on the planet, to his cracked lips, sarcasm lightly spreading thick on his tongue.

Later when he finds out that she knows everything, nightmares and all, he crosses his arms over his chest, because truth is as relative as most things in this world. Love among those as well.

[haunted]

For the first time in one hundred and fifty years, someone cares. Even if it is just a slap in the face. Literally.

[162 candles]

It's petty and childish beyond all the time that he's spent wreaking havoc on this godforsaken spit of land, and honestly, only for a moment does he feel a twinge of regret when he slams that piece of wood through her chest, rupturing the hole where her thriving heart should be.

He liked Lexi. Always had. But there was one thing that just pissed him off to no end. Was he not worthy of being saved, by anyone?

[history repeating]

All those fairytales are full of shit, he muses, lifting the brown liquor to his chapped lips. And again, his brother gets the happy ending.

[turning point]

But does he really want in the tomb that badly? Part of him figures he's loved Katherine as long as he can recall so he should never have to remember anything else. The other part of him perks his ears and listens to the smack of metal on pavement and the screams of a sweet sixteen year old in need of saving.

And he's just a fallen savior in Satan's clothing.

[bloodlines]

It's early autumn in Georgia, leaves doing a dying dance to the crisp ground, and her feet are planted firmly in the harvest grass as she about faces and scans his features for a trace of sincerity. "Can I trust you," she asks, her lips cracked with dry blood, head tilted to the side, ever so cautiously examining him. She's apprehensive so he smiles the best he can (the best, _ever_).

"Get in the car." His cocky conviction rolling off the tongue laced with smoky smooth mahogany and years of experience seem to do the trick as she pops her eyebrows and climbs in the front seat.

Damon spins the wheel, and off they fly against the wind, his fingers drumming out Tom Petty and Willy Nelson beats on the bruised and battered leather. The windows are slightly open and out the corner of his eye, he can tell she is taking a mental vacation. It will do some good.

They arrive at Bree's, and he's all booze, bravado, and bragging rights. The woman twice his age blushes under the stare of his sky lit blue orbs, pours another drink, and ignores how much attention he pays to the young lady with the cocoa hair, lively amber eyes, and skull cut cheekbones. She is a girl that anyone in their right mind would take a hit for, considers Bree, slopping bourbon into glasses across the bar.

"He is good in the sack, isn't he?!" she finally exclaims and watches the girl's face drop, holding in her laughter and repressing a smirk, she wonders when women will stop falling for Damon Salvatore when the only woman he has ever chased has been dead for decades on end, rotting in the deepest layer of hell under soil. This girl doesn't deserve that.

But there is a lilt to his voice and a fleck in his eye that may tell her otherwise.

[-]

Later when the night has come and swallowed the south of Georgia whole, wrapping its hands of inky streams all around, silence falls eerily and she disappears. With a shake of the head and a roll of the mesmerizing eyes at the bartender, he carries outside, calling her name instead finding a broken fairytale of a cell phone and a bitch of modernity. The vamp slams his eternal face with a wooden bat, crackling splinters flying in every and all ways, and he can just hear the sound of a pleading child to please please please, don't.

"Thank you", she chokes, fingers stuck betwixt her cherry stained lips, as the pain momentarily ceases and the night stills once again.

"It wasn't for you," Lexi's boyfriend says, taking off, blurring like a breeze into the night.

[-]

"You're not the worst company in the world, Elena," he lists off a rattling list of reasons why he stole (want[s]) her, ignoring her growing smile played on a two day old bender of free time and stress-less vacay that she can't get back. She folds into the front seat, body hot with the rising November sun, closes her eyes.

[unpleasantville]

"She looks like Katherine," says the snitch, the house defiler, the one hit wonder guy. The look on his face is a mix of disgusting obsession and pure pity.

She's not Katherine, Damon thinks. He knows that better than anyone.

[children of the damned]

He charms Aunt Jenna. Pours glass after glass of pinot noir and watches her cheeks get rosy and full as she laughs and tells him horror stories of college and dating. She's got sass, spunk.

"He's ridiculously hot," Jenna giggles into Elena's ear like a schoolgirl, red wine tasting the rim of her drunk glass.

"He's an ass," the girl replies, a twitch of a smirk playing on her lips. Damon rolls his eyes, twists his mouth into a wry grin, lifts his eyebrow in good natured fun.

Even though he knows they aren't related, he watches her with Elena. It's easy and simple and they bounce off the other. He likes to see her like this. Without all the vampire drama or the witch feuds or the dueling for the grimoure. She really is just a gorgeous sixteen year old girl with a kick ass aunt and a moody downtrodden teenage brother.

He tries to admit that he is not jealous in anyway. (_Is it true, his renewed sense of brotherhood? I have nothing but disappointment for you, Damon._)

[-]

Family is overrated (_Damon put his faith in me, and I destroyed that_). Feelings are weakness (_You. You had me fooled_). She's nothing but a demon with an angels' face. And still he falls for it every time.

[fool me once]

Anna snarks some comment about offing Elena, and his heart catches in his chest. "When you want to do this?" he questions, putting his arms over his torso. She scoffs, a smug look snatched on her face.

"God it's like 1864 all over again." He's too embarrassed to correct her.

[-]

"You and I have something : an understanding. I know my betrayal hurt you," she tells him, trying to meet his iced over orbs of crystal azure. The I won't take no for an answer stitched on her mouth as he pitches forward finally meeting her head on.

"I didn't compel you in Atlanta because we were having fun. I wanted it to be real." He means it to sound off the cuff, a turn of phrase that he just thought of, but the sting lashes back too hard, and he can tell he strikes a nerve.

[-]

"Damon please," she begs, chocolate tresses a surprisingly neat curtain on her amber face, eyes lit with desperation, and he obeys because if he's going to be honest, he'll follow her into a dark shadow, hands at the ready to defend her honor rather than wait for the licks from his brother. And so it goes.

[a few good men]

"I found out who my birth mother is," she tells him, slender fingers braiding the buttons of his inky shirt, excitement laced in her tones.

He bores his ice blue eyes into her sweet cocoa ones, making her understand this as best a sixteen year old innocent can. "Who cares she left you? She sucks." Her eyes widen and her hands drop from his chest. When he flounces away, shrugging into a dinner jacket, whiskey still wet on his lips, he feels no regret for his words because he knows he's right. How could anyone ever begin to comprehend abandoning this girl?

[-]

"Go ahead reminisce about how you killed her." The sentence sends sharp shooting sensations through his fingers, itching to slip the skin of her collarbone and lie, lie, lie about how much he wishes that he could be different, but if he was, then he wouldn't be what she needs.

Still, the look struck across her face.

[-]

"Unrequited love sucks," he declares, sticking a stake in Alaric Saltzman, evil grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. It is only afterwards that he wonders whom he is speaking of.

[there goes the neighborhood]

"I no longer have any desire to see Katherine every again," he says and means it.

[let the right one in]

He turns the switch back on.

[under control]

In the midst of a crisis, absentee blood stained on his invisibly shaking hands, she stands before him in a cocktail mocktail skimp of a skirt, eyes wide and concerned like a scared animal, fingers rattling the ice in her empty tumbler. With the flick of an eye, the lift of a sneer, he plucks the ripest crimson rose, inhaling its dangerously delicate scent and places it in her hand. She only raises her head to smell it when she believes his back is turned. He, however, doesn't miss the subtle gesture of gratitude in a time of blood red turmoil.

[miss mystic falls]

Not for the first time in his life, Damon reaps the benefits of his younger brother running off the rails. He looks with watchful eyes at the world crashing before him, the girl's eyes terrified and twitching about, blazing a fine trail of fake confidence as he takes her hand in his, feeling the ripples coursing through her body.

"What are we going to do?" she asks him, visibly loud panic rising in her whispers as the five piece band starts up and they begin a dance that is older than he is. She leans forward, barely grazing the cold palm of his skin, brushing the streams of her steely blue gown on his ankles in the late March sun.

He tries to remember that she is not Katherine, this isn't 1864, and he hasn't won. She's scared and worried and threatened and still, her heart kicks up a notch with his hand pressed lightly into the naked shoulder blades of her spine cavity. A baby birth of a smile playing on her mouth because Katherine always said that Stefan was the better dancer, but the way Elena's heart smatters against the fine lapel of his collar leads him to think that may not have been true.

[blood brothers]

"You'll be here again tonight?" he questions, splashing some whiskey into a glass, eyes downcast, slight sarcasm stuck on his throat.

"Is that a problem?" she returns with just as much sass. She looks up from folding his and Stefan's laundry, arranging it in neat little piles. All of his is fitted jeans and deep night black sweaters and well worn shirts. Stefan's plaids, flannels, and low riding chinos. Her hair is a little bit messy from the housework, but she still smiles and accepts his teasing.

"Yes, you're a complete nuisance," Damon tells her, his tone light and full of air. She slings a purse over her shoulder and heads for the door, calling out a goodbye. He kinda (really) enjoys having a live in girlfriend, even if she isn't his to begin with.

[isobel]

"We're on the same side," the raven haired, porcelain skinned bitch tells him with his hands tightening around her throat.

"Oh yeah, who's is that?" he spits at her, knuckles growing white.

"Katherine's." And it comes out as a whisper of recognition, not a bang, when he realizes that maybe that isn't the truth anymore. He leans forward pressing in her voice box hearing the soft purring of a last word as his own sounds ring out before he has the audacity to hold them in.

"You don't come into my town and threaten the people I care about." Slamming her head into the hardwood floor, he vamps off, trying not to regurgitate because he just gave her the ultimate weapon against him: a simple innocent of sixteen with cocoa eyes, amber hair, and sandalwood skin.

[-]

"You took a risk with Damon," Elena tells her birth mother, toe to toe with ferocity in her gaze and might in her step. "How did you know he was going to give it to me?"

Isobel returns a hit with a punch to the gut that no one but him ever saw coming. "Because he's in love with you," she softly speaks to her blood daughter, one time letting the woman she once was seep to the surface. Out the corner of her jet black eye, she watches the brothers exchange a glance that tells the veracity of her words. Stefan looks at Damon with pity. Damon examines his younger brother with something akin to guilt. Elena cannot look at either of them thus confirming what Isobel thought. The truth can only stay barred for so long.

[-]

History will not be repeating itself his younger brother quietly says the words rolling off his tongue with conviction because Elena is not Katherine. Swallowing the last gasp of aged bourbon, Damon still thinks that he might know that better than his brother. It's exactly the reason for the birth of this confession.

[founder's day]

It's like their whole relationship halts the moment her and Stefan figure out what has brought Damon back into himself. She confronts him in the grille with her eyes shifted downcast, arms folded tight across her breasts, loose whorls of curls laying on her shoulders, mouth in a grim straight line wanting friendship and not a centimeter of anything more. Even dishes out warnings. "I think you should stop with the flirty little comments and that eye thing you do," she snaps, lingering on his lips for a smidge of a second too long to be that so friendly that she wants.

"What little eye thing?" he plays coy, jumping an inky brow up his arched pallid forehead, lucid eyes burning little holes in her sandalwood skin. She sighs with annoyance, belittling the growing smirk on her mouth and saunters off. Yes, he has learnt a great deal in such a short time, and Elena Gilbert, does _anything_ but loathe him.

[-]

Licking flames on his back as he wakes and feels the flooding waves of stinging sacrifice all around him. His body stiff as a board prostrate on the floor, Pearl's daughter on his right with a self-serving man above her, looking downward where he believes this girl might belong, and Damon cannot do a damn thing except close his eyes when the stake pierces Anna's heart because someone there is a damaged broody boy that loves her for all that she is despite her misgivings. He wants to help because he hopes someday that she might love him for all his misgivings too. Closing his flickering eyes, he wonders when he became more human than living, breathing human John Gilbert.

[-]

He shows up and makes an attempt at coaxing baby brother Gilbert into giving up his pain only to result in twenty questions that he really doesn't feel like fucking answering. He wants to tell him that you can turn it off if you want, but finding the switch is harder than you might think.

She appears on the porch and his 1864 chivalry overtakes his badassness as he spins apologies and means them and she looks at him like this isn't what she ever expected. "I'm not a hero. I don't do good," he whispers staring at his feet.

Lifting a hand to raise his chin and allow herself to be lost with him of all things, he places a chaste kiss of thanks on her cheek, feeling the warmth radiate from the way her eyes simmer with cocoa flames, silky seductive to the touch skin on his, both hands tangled in her mess of half day old curls and he knows then that he's not the hero, he's not good, but that's not what makes her love him back.

[the return]

There's so much yelling and screaming and tears that he doesn't know if it is still the same night or day or whatever and all he can think about is the way her lips slid perfectly between his, locking them together like matching puzzle pieces of the flesh. Her hair whips by him, body heat singing his. Outstretching an arm, he grasps and holds on for dear life, or ya know, after life. "If you want to forget it happened that's fine but I can't." His eyes are wracked with desperation even with all the suffering and pain and death writhing on hospital beds and on hot asphalt, all he can think about is the moment that 145 years in the making was on his side. It comes as a shock when her recollection is burnt away by a doppelganger hijinks that he never saw coming, a sullied confession meant for another girl.

[-]

"Why is it such a surprise that I'd kiss you?" he finally gets to ask over a dead mayor's canapés and cocktails afternoon 'all is right, but not really' funeral created by the founding fathers.

She sighs, furrowing her brow in way that would make his brother jealous. "It's not," she says flatly. She knows him well enough to know that this wouldn't hurt. And then she lobs her bomb, "It's a surprise that you thought I'd kiss you back." If he could breathe, the oxygen would be sucked right out of his lungs, if his heart could beat it would shatter in his chest, any other poetic shit he's missing? Note to self, consult Stefan's diary, yes diary not journal, for future heart wrenching references.

[-]

Back to back, sloppy with whiskey and drained of the last smidge of his humanity, leaking out in pools, the only two women he's ever, ever thought to feel for break all resolve and send whatever might have been substantial into an oblivion of booze and broken souls and he wants to know what he does wrong so that he can fix it._ Fuck_, how can he fix it?

_I never loved you; it was always Stefan_ slurs the temptress on the skin of his collarbone_. It's always going to be Stefan _murmurs the fallen angel into the fabric of his shoulder. His half empty glass collapses and fragmented crackling cries in the greedily licking flames of the fire. The only sound echoes over and over on repeat: dead silence.

[brave new world]

She stops the witch from making a filet out of him, and he halfheartedly considers when he should start calling this a debt.

[bad moon rising]

The car ride to Duke is hours of deafening quiet with little quips from Ric thrown in about behavior and misdemeanor and all kinds of teacher-y words that he swears to all holy hell the man hasn't used a day in his life. Campus is quiet and deserted of students as they pull in the sunlight hitting the freshly mown grass and picturesque brick reflecting the stench of education.

Isobel's office is clad with books and memorabilia of supernatural shit, awkward shots of vampires with bared fangs, werewolves high up on hind legs, and Damon wonders how in the fuck Ric ever thought his wife was awesome. Fingers teasing the pages of a musty text, the girl from the reception strolls on into the dank room of weird and begins probing with uncomfortable questions and inquiries and then _bam_ out whips a fucking_ crossbow_. He barely has time to react as the thing points north at Elena and then finds a seed in his spine, ripping the column. A tiny blood red gasp escapes her lips when he topples to the floor, knees slamming the hardwood. Before he shuts his eyes, he briefly acknowledges the fact that, hey, at least the playing ground is a bit more level.

[-]

"Have I lost you forever?" he whispers, eyes half shut in sleepy evening of a warm autumn night in Virginia, feeling the creaking planks of the porch beneath his feet.

She saunters on up, plucking the cranberry leather from his hands and breathes a sigh of yes before disappearing behind closed doors. With her fingers on the brass knob, he gets in a last jab to prod her. "You and Katherine are more alike than you think." It comes out with more vinegar than he means, but he doesn't regret the words.

[memory lane]

Snatching a few fries off her plate, he smirks and tells her that him and his peach cobbler will see her at home. The look of disdain is amusing, but still burns a little.

[-]

Even though he can tell from the slightest movements that she remains pissed off (_that move was deliberate_, and it might have been, not that he's going to admit it), she wants to know how it's going with Mason Lockwood, has to have her petite scab of a nose in all of his business. Jenna is drunk and mad as well, blue eyes locked and loaded on him dishing out sour sayings with sweet peach cobbler and antique silver.

He sighs, ducking his head, "I'm a work in progress." Working his hands over the silver and walking out shoulders square, he has a mission and nothing to prove. Or so he repeats over and over.

[-]

Downing yet another whiskey neat, he strains his hearing to the sounds of her and his baby brother, pretending to argue with false lies stitched on their lips and half-hearted sheets of wrong wrong _wrong _hanging in the air between them. He isn't the only one catching their every turn of phrase with condition; however, he wagers that he might be the only one that receives empty hope from their squabble.

[kill or be killed]

"You don't fight especially over me," he snarks at his brother under an October sun heavy on his shoulders, resting a palm on Stefan's neck. His brother's mere grin doesn't deny anything underlying that might have passed through his head on more than one occasion. A seed is planted.

[-]

With wooden bullets inching further, encrypting messages on his flesh and writing eulogies on his bones, he glances over at his little brother and begs him with some kind of supernatural sibling connection to wake up and please please help me do something about this shit, because Stefan is supposed to be the hero, not him. What's left of his hearing permits him to sound out the crunching of leaves overhead and the smell of lavender and amber and all he can hear is her voice, laced with fear and conviction. Really, Stefan isn't the hero and neither is he, it's always been her. A chuckle and he realizes that he's forever in her service.

[-]

He's got the sheriff locked in the dungeon. Never thought those words would come out of his mouth. As much hospitality as managed, he's made a bed and a pot of flowers, fixed her some food because she is his friend, and he doesn't have that many so the ones he does have, he tries. Her face is down, hair a flat paper of kid-blonde, blue eyes ghosted over with concern.

"She's your daughter, Liz." He can hear the faintest of footsteps, smell the lightest of lilacs and poppies as Caroline hovers outside the doorway.

"Not anymore. My daughter is gone," she tells him and Damon can sincerely feel his heart grow a bit for the vampire Barbie because no one really deserves that. His father thought the same thing and look what happened to him.

He leans forward and thinks of compelling her right then and there. This can be fixed. "You have no idea how wrong you are." Her face is tight and the tears are sliding salty causeways down her apple bitten cheeks. Every child deserves a parent. Not every child gets one. He never did, not everyone else should suffer the same fate.

[plan b]

He lights the match that sparks the great burning of the end of the relationship of the two people that he cares for most in this world. She leaves with mascara streaming in thick black streaks on her face, eyes stained with red splotches, and lips chapped and quivering with each shaky breath that she takes. Apologies fall out his mouth and shatter on the carpet. They rued and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

[masquerade]

The entire town makes an appearance at these kinds of events, all champagne in aged crystal, crudités served on antebellum china and antiqued silver. It makes him brim with nostalgia and sickness glimpsing over his past so close, with his hands twisted on the stem of a glass he may have used over a century old. Still plans must be set in motion. "You spent 145 years loving her," his brother tells him, hands in pockets in defeat because as simple as this seemed on paper, in practice it holds a whole other realm of fuck-ups waiting to happen.

Jaw squared, shoulders back, eyes straight ahead with confidence, he denies time and declares to Stefan without missing a beat, "I won't mess it up." Nothing about his tone begs to differ.

[-]

Stefan pounds a stake in her shoulder, violet blood spilling forth as the piece of wood he fires lodges in the spinal column piercing her raven lace dress. Katherine cried out in pain, but there is a hidden malicious smile threatening to simmer on her strawberry stained pout.

Jeremy bursts in shouting about how his sister and the vampire twin are linked. Everything Katherine feels, Elena does. He even beats Stefan to the punch. "Wait." And it's a prayer.

[-]

"Elena can feel everything I feel," she proclaims knowing full well that she outsmarted them. The Mason killing left her inspired apparently, cocky smirk on her face as she delicately crosses one black high heel over the other. And then temptress that she is, ignites something he finds difficult to ignore. "Kiss me, Damon," the wicked bitch commands laughing at her own cleverness, "She'll feel that too."

His eyes dart around curiously from her to his baby brother who has the look of disbelief and nonchalant distaste on his brows. If only, if only.

[-]

For once, he gets the last word.

"She's the doppelganger. She needs to be protected," Katherine yells, voice bordering on pathetic, tears wrecking her cocoa eyes, obsolete of fire because he has never ever in his existence seen this woman scared.

He's no hero. He's not his brother, but there is one thing he can promise to do without regret, one thing that he can claim consistency upon. "Then I'll protect her," he vows, grating the rock on rock, slamming the door shut on his past.

[rose]

"You're coming with me?" Stefan asks, hands wringing through his super hero haircut, bottle green eyes wracked with worry.

"It's Elena," he tells him, biting off each syllable. He _has_ to protect her, he doesn't know how not to.

[-]

His moment of glory is short lived when she rushes into Stefan's arms, Damon's eyes dropping to the floor in disappointment. Lifting his head, he looks north and sees her mouth a quick thank you muffled into his brother's shoulder blade. Quickly quipped welcome sounds silently out of his lips, and he wonders if his brother can hear the deafening clamor of their lips pulling together to speak noiseless music behind his back.

[-]

Her eyebrows are knitted together in concern as he dangles the rustic jewel before her face, swiping it just out of reach long enough to make his confession to an empty room where she is just a woman that a man loves too much.

"I just have to say it once," he says, watching the careful way her lips purse in the beginning of a sigh and a no, please stop. "You just need to hear it. I love you Elena." He reaches out, softly fingering her chestnut tresses, the way they dip precariously onto the glowing skin of her collarbone. "And it's because I love you that I can't be selfish with you, why you can't know this," the words come easier now rolling off his tongue with sweet conviction because love may be a vampire's greatest weakness, but she is his. "I don't deserve you, but my brother does," he memorizes the planes of her face as she concentrates on the golden threaded prose falling from his lips, and has not once said the word he dreaded with the end of his days.

He can feel the way his pupils grow then shrink as he compels her, makes her forget, not for the first time. "God. I wish you didn't have to forget this but you do." The early autumn breeze blows through the slipping silk on her window and his tears are still fresh when the wind gets knocked out of him landing on the Virginia soil. Chocking back a sob, he straightens up and pretends that he, too, has forgot. But forever is an awfully long time to lie to yourself.

[katerina]

"Being in love with your brother's girlfriend must be difficult," says the five hundred year old vixen, venom on her tongue, and yet he can tell that she is being sincere in the oddest way. She doesn't know the half of it.

[-]

"I wish we could save Elena. I know that you want to," Rose tells him, pouring herself a glass of scotch from his crystal carafe. She indulges a sip, swirls the gold liquid around in her glass.

Without hesitation, Damon flies off the handle with a response, "I will." The senior vamp suppresses a grin. This girl will die loved, possibly more so than Katerina ever has been.

[the sacrifice]

"He'd die before he let anything happen to her," Elijah tells the warlock, a playful grin daring to emerge on his face. She will be kept safe.

[-]

Katherine and Stefan listen to Damon and the girl fight with big heaving screams and thrusting shoves on rubble, voices pitched louder and louder with a sickening echo. The vampire succubus smirks and twirls her fingers in her hair. Yes, there is a pencil thin, almost invisible, line between love and hate.

[by the light of the moon]

"I don't love men who love other women," Rose smirks, the words ghosting over her mouth while he has no room to protest.

[the descent]

He cries when he kills Rose, plunging the wood into her throbbing heart. It's his secret. One that's all for him because the fact that he has them [thoughts, feelings, emotions, cares] makes him too much man and not enough of the monster he is supposed to be.

[-]

Rage simmers on the surface, daring to venture out and sting like a rabid beast, taking down any and all threats. "I feel, Elena, okay? And it sucks," he shouts, throwing his hands in the air, wringing them nervously through his raven tresses. She has the decency to duck her head as he tells her the truth. "What sucks even more was that it was supposed to be me." Spit breeds on his tongue as the last words struggle out and hang in the air, the weight suffocating and overbearing. Yes, this is what he remembers.

[-]

His hands are viciously yanking at this poor (innocent) girl's hair, ripping the copper penny red strands off her skull as he bores his ice blue orbs into her forgetful hazel ones. Diatribes live for a minute on his mouth, broken confessions never meant to see anything under the dusk of sun beating for one helpless time that he wishes he could compel himself to blindly mistake. "I can't be what other people want me to be, what she wants me to be. This is who I am," he whispers and the poetry gasps miles wide, blanketing the quiet Virginia fields. "I'm not human, and I miss it more than anything in the world." Tears threaten his damaged azure eye as he bites out the last bit to a girl that he will kill and then the whole thing will be an illusion that never happened, "That is my secret." Her screams pierce the plum stained black canopy of stars, cherry blood streams caveating to the February asphalt.

[daddy issues]

Stefan laughs as his big brother tells him half truths riddled with ridiculous notions because let's be honest here, Damon will never not be the big bad. "Better watch your back cause I may have to get a hero hairdo of my own and steal your thunder," the words fall on deaf eardrums because his baby brother knows that will never be the case.

[-]

"Be the better man," she says and means it, eyes defiant and crude, waiting for the what she hopes will be self-fulfilling prophecy.

He counters with a retort and watches her features twist into a grimace. "You need to stop doing that," hands on his hips, flashes in his orbs, "Assuming I'll be the good guy cause it's you asking," Damon says to her, and just for a second there is a flicker of guilt on her face. She knows how heavy her weight is on his shoulders, and never once has she apologized. But then again never once has he been sorry to comply.

[-]

The blonde haired (not action, Ric reminds him) news lady fills his antique porcelain tub with lavender oils and chiffon scrubs, sipping sweet rose out of the stemware on his tiled floor. Striking as she is, decadent as the words flow off her lips, wracked with concern, ears attuned to his suffering, he spills and watches her mop him up. "I'm in love with a woman I can never have," he spells out the truth, and she sits backwards accepting his insidious manners. She leans in, feeling his skin on hers and widens her eyes, drawing more out, "The point is that I'm in love with her, and it's driving me crazy." Andie purses her lips and throws her humanity in his face, moving piles of puddles of bubbles over the glass of her wine, offering all the wisdom a sweet young twenty something can. God, he wishes he could fall in love with her and those golden curls, sparkled eyes, and jaded laugh lines in the appled cheeks.

"Love does that to us, Damon. It changes us." It's matter of fact and boiling realization, and she tips her elegant neck to his service. He tastes her warm tangy blood on his tongue and again, deludes himself that maybe she could be loveable, if and only if, there wasn't a girl with sandalwood skin, amber eyes, and cocoa hair that made him a man instead of a beast.

[crying wolf]

"Keep Elena safe," the Original with the awful hair reminds him. He wants to assure this guy, even with his thousands of years of life and vivacity that even Elijah couldn't cross him when it came to this girl.

[the dinner party]

A sick part of him is happy to catch Katherine completely naked exiting his shower, droplets of water coursing down her arms, sliding in the warm valley of her breasts, trickling between her legs into that hot wet region of a woman that makes any man reckless. He blushes in spite of himself because he later, a smidge guiltily, thinks that is what _she_ probably looks like when she gets out of the shower.

[the house guest]

Learning that Katherine wanted him dead is no surprise honestly. The bitch is at least seven different kinds of crazy, but her reasoning still hits a cord, even after a century and a half.

"So you chose Stefan?" he asks in regard to the dagger, the white ash, and the Original. Kind of a not funny joke. "Of course you did," he answers before she has the chance. She may have loved Stefan all this time, but no one understood her like Damon, he thinks ruefully gazing into the last dying embers of a night flame.

[-]

His ears perk up, indulging the sweet malignant symphony of Ric and Jenna on the front porch, Ric's profession breaking forth like unheld water from a damn, and his fucking heart, if he had one, snaps in two for his friend as the door slams and the woman abandons him in the dark. They're cut from the same cloth in some respects he realizes, drowning the evening in bourbon and banality.

[know thy enemy]

Lifting John in the air, fingers wrapped in his jacket, without regret to remove that stupid fucking ring and snap his neck because no one and I mean no one, hurts Elena, especially her shitty excuse for a father figure.

[the last dance]

For a moment in time, brief as the passing light, the two blood brothers share a particular instinct over Katherine, literally the last thing they had in common was their out of control, insatiable love for one ghost of a woman, until now.

[-]

Plucking her right from Stefan's grasp, spinning her out into the throng of oblivious high schoolers, and sending her careening into his chest, laughter rising in a gulp from his mouth, she giggles flirtatiously, flushing her dark skin against his own paleness. "You're good at this," she compliments, dipping backwards, feeling his hands secure her nimble waist.

"I've got moves you're never seen," Damon teases, wiggling his eyebrows playfully. There's this side that he rarely sees and loves to cherish, bringing it out is borderline impossible in their lifetimes, but it has surfaced more than once under his watch. He dips her deeply once more, one hand on the curve of her hip as she smiles bigger than he's ever seen. He likes that he can do that to her.

[-]

With the aid of witch bitch, the plan skillfully avoids Klaus' wandering eyes, but not without a sharp smack to his chiseled jawline and repetitive glares from his baby brother, but the last thing he is going to be is sorry for saving her life. "I don't mind being the bad guy, Stefan," he lectures his little brother, climbing stairs out Stefan's grasp lest anger get the best of him, "I'll make all the life and death decisions while you're worrying about collateral damage, but at the end of the day, I'll be the one to keep her alive," Damon finishes, glad he has some height advantage and 182 years of badassery on his side. The heat on his cheek in still hot from her hand, and his baby brother furrows his eyebrow, the information sinking in. It's one thing to be a hero, but what kind of hero are you if you can't even risk it all to save the damsel in distress?

[-]

She apologizes, hair in a neat curtain over her embarrassed face, trying not to recall the quick slap on his face not an hour earlier. He quickly reprieves her mortification, putting his slender fingers on her features, tracing her eyebrows, skimming on the bridge of her nose, flitting her long eyelashes, memorizing the pressure in her eyes as he tells her that, "I will always choose you." Humanity will be the death of him, yet he'll be happy to die knowing that he was loved in some fashion, by her, by his brother, by his friends.

[Klaus]

"It's my decision, Stefan. Please respect that," she spits through miles and miles of phone cord, the words landing with a harshness on his baby brother's ear drums, rattling his core because even he as the hero cannot do a damn thing to save the damsel in distress. Straining to hear the rest, he casually leans on the doorjamb. With a sigh, she says, "Tell Damon not to do anything stupid." Internally he laughs because really, she knows him almost too well.

[-]

Klaus tells Elijah more than five hundred years ago that vampires are not weak because they do not, and cannot love. Damon wonders if Klaus has ever been under the gaze of a woman for more than fifteen seconds. It is enough to disarm a battalion, to take down a kingdom, to wage a revolution, to end the human race. Clearly, all these years on earth has taught that smug English fuck nothing at all.

[-]

Running a hand over the battered wood of the grand staircase, Damon slowly shuffles to his bedroom, taking in the last melodramatic notes of his little brother, broody eyes and wrinkled forehead with a taste for destructive confrontation on the tip of his tongue.

"Thank you for being in love with my girlfriend."

"And there it is." Truthfully, it is almost better this way having it all out in the open. Not that Stefan is stupid, not really. And then the birth of a smarting smile takes shape on those lips, fangs at the ready, going in for the kill.

He smirks, "You can be in love with Elena all you want if that means you'll protect her, but I have the one thing you'll never have."

"Oh yeah, what's that?" he challenges his brother right back with equal venom dripping from his mouth.

"Her respect."

Any snark that was present for comeback dies with his fist inside Stefan's gut.

[the last day]

Klausageddon brims on the horizon, haunting any notion of safety even in the brightest sunlight of the day. He's lived over a century and this is more than he can bear, watching her innocence pipe out her fingernails and die on the Persian rug, engrain into the hardwood floors, and just sacrifice everything so that the rest of the world has a chance. He hates her so much for being such an intolerable fucking martyr.

"I can't lose you," he says, his words falling on deaf ears as she barely meets his eyes.

With as much determination as a fallen angel can dignify she lies, sweetly with honey, "You won't."

"There's another way." And with one spot of peasant blood, he sends her straight to hell.

[-]

The Original shakes his head in mirth at the young impulsive vampire, head over heels in love with the young girl of seventeen that belongs to his own kin. Lifting the aged scotch to his mouth, he grins around the lip of the glass.

Damon raises his eyebrows in defensive mode, "Stefan would have never done it," he challenges Elijah, knowing smirk playing on his lips.

Elijah sighs. Where Stefan may be the best thing for Elena, Damon is the absolute antithesis of that. "She'll never forgive you," he drawls, "And never for a vampire is a very long time." The look on the young man's face is anything but embarrassed. Elijah drains his drink, straightens his shoulders, and nods at Damon's retreating figure. Though he's not ever going to admit it, nor share his thoughts with anyone else, Damon will be the savior in Satan's clothing that no one ever expected. He will always be able to do what Stefan never can : follow through.

[-]

His baby brother's voice cracks through the line in defeat, shaky breaths coming quickly like death warmed over. "Klaus came. He took her."

"I'll take care of it," Damon replies, promise hanging in the air. And he will.

[the sun also rises]

It goes from shit storm to hell on earth with the simple snarl of a wolf's teeth in his forearm. And then the universe stops its breathing because Klaus outmaneuvers the evilest of all evil and sends a strawberry blond darling straight to hades in a handbasket, slops oxblood juice down her chin and thrusts a night bitten tree in her heart, and Damon watches as Elena forgets how to scream. With Jenna's blood between his brother's fingers, and Elijah's hand in Klaus' chest, it all collapses under written pretense of false lies and sad historical repetition. Even magic wouldn't work now.

Mustering his strength, his fingers wrap around her body and bring her from the brink of the white light to the new dawn, and he begs, pleads for her not to come back as a vampire. "I couldn't be able to have you hate me forever," he breathes, the last confession on his sullied mouth. Ric and Jeremy watch closely, and with a short jerk of his head, he watches as his best friend shrivels to ebbs and flows of a nonexistent tide.

[-]

"You wanna do something for me? Keep this from Elena. The last thing she needs is another grave to mourn." The minute he tells his baby brother, veins protruding violent and purplish indigo, rose red agitated beyond doubt, he wishes he could take it back because the shot of fear in Stefan's bottle green eyes reminds him why he's the big brother and Stefan isn't. He can handle this. Not because he wants to, but because he knows that he has to. And for his sake, and Elena's, he will bear it.

[as I lay dying]

He thinks it would be the most peaceful way to go. Sunlight streaming, leaving precious ditties of creamy mango color slitted into his porcelain skin. Warm to the feel like liquid honey, bathing him a ray of gold. Removing his lapis lazuli, the heat starts to take hold, scorching flits of paper on his body and then just when it appears on release Stefan throws him in the dungeons and sends Ric for suicide watch.

They slam bourbon and Damon begs his best friend for a cathartic death at the hands of someone he knows loves him. With the lift of a brow, bottle to his lips, Alaric shrugs, and commands him to shut the hell up. Damon concurs in that moment with his life on the line, Ric's fingers prying on the dungeon bars that he's never really had a friend in 145 years before this man. And he fucked up his entire life.

[-]

It all shuts black, a whirling dervish with 1864 outfits in a modern world, and it feels sick, like his memories have been stuck in a blender, no consistency, just all milky and floating. The sky a black canvas spat with silver platinum shards of past and present, and the only thing that remains is how beautiful the girl is. All sandalwood skin, amber eyes with firey iridescent flecks, long auburn locks of hair gracefully drifting onto her collarbone, the faintest hint of musk on her hot hot skin. If he has to die, he rejects the sun he once thought was his relief. He'd gladly go one knowing that he perished in her arms, unafraid, adored, needed, _loved_.

[-]

"It's okay, Elena, it's okay, because if I had chosen differently, I wouldn't have met you. I'm so sorry. I've done so many horrible things to you." He whispers into her hair, gently shifting the locks of amber from side to side, dancing in the breeze.

"It's okay. I forgive you," she breathes on his neck, fat warm tears lolling to their rest on his shoulders.

Eyes shut with fatigue, he croaks out his final confession as a dying man. One thing she just needs to know without vervain, without compulsion. Just for her. "I know you love Stefan, that it's always going to be Stefan, but I love you. You should know that."

"I do, I do."

"You should have met me in 1864. You would have liked me then." It's supposed to be a joke, but his air is hitching in his throat, and he can feel the way his stomach pops in and out with quicker replies, silencing the passage of breath to his lung and his throat and then with one last gasp, he leans into her collarbone, feeling the sweetness of the girl who made him a man instead of a monster.

"I like you now. Just the way you are," she tells him, placing her lips on his in the most pure way that a devil should never taste. If this is death, he'd gladly take it. When he finds out that his baby brother faced all hasten to find a cure and save his sad, pathetic excuse for an existence, he'd rather death have taken him hostage for eternity. _He's _supposed to be the big brother, even if Stefan is supposed to be the hero.

[the birthday]

He wants to give her everything he can when she turns eighteen. All gorgeous brunette curls in a sleek wave down her sandalwood skin, amber eyes pulled down at the corners in defeat, mouth set in a thin line cursing the laugh dimples that used to sit in her appled cheeks. She looks much older than she should, he thinks. Damon wants to give her reassurance, hope, her life back.

The only thing he can deliver is a thousand year old piece of sterling metal with his brother's fingerprints stained all upon it and disappointment that only the two of them could understand, rooted in a lost summer of supposed trail blazed get aways and haunted vacation weekends all trashed the moment he laid eyes on his baby brother, bottle green orbs absent of humanity.

Damon doesn't give her life, in fact, he hands her death on a silver platter.

[the hybrid]

Even in the darkest tips under the full Tennessee, blood bathes of centuries past and generations lost and found, Stefan still caught under the thumb and incensed in the deepest circle of hell, finds a way to pull Damon from the wreckage. Damon hates him, hates him, hates him in that moment because the flicker of humanity sparks in the second he breathes her name to his brother, watches the light hint in his eyes with the soft mumble of angel across his tongue because even though he wants his brother back, wants him safe, wants him _home_, the price seems too high to reach.

Stefan's self-righteousness is exhausting even in the most unnervingly awful of situations. It's also what makes Damon miss his baby brother more than he cares to admit.

[-]

"Yes I worry about you. Why do you even have to hear me say it?" she threatens, eyes ablaze with new rage at his hostile presence towering in her line of vision.

"Because," he retorts, venom on his tongue, truth stitched on his lips, "When I drag my brother from the edge and deliver him back to you, I want you to remember the things you felt while he was gone." The shock in her eyes is terrifying, and he can only imagine that it mirrors his own. The rules seem to have been lifted and slipped from their grasp. It's a whole new world, adulterating in all its ferocity. And neither of them knows what they're doing.

[the end of the affair]

Damon fell in love with Katherine when he was twenty three years old. She was horrible and tainted and tasted of wine and sin. All the bad wrapped up in this devil in a red party dress, decadence twirling at her fingertips and spilling over into his mouth.

Damon fell in love with Elena when he was one hundred and forty seven years old. She is good and pure and tastes of nectar and a promised land that his blackened heart will probably never venture. He loves her for all the reasons he is not, never has been, and never will be.

Damon fell in love with Stefan when he was four years old. All waves of cocoa hair tripping into bottle evergreen eyes, the nervous tick of an anxious and unembarrassed smile birthed on his baby brother's mouth. He never really reasons his love for his brother, all angst ridden and difficult to repress the love you have for a sibling, hard to rectify and swift to forgive. He can never ever really hate him and never ever really condone his behavior because he's said it before, Damon was always meant to be the big brother, even if Stefan was the hero. This is important to him because no matter how many times he screws up or defies fate or wrestles universal components, Stefan has always and will always look to him as his older brother. His savior. It's the best and scariest kind of love that Damon has known.

[disturbing behavior]

The blood is still fresh, hot and juicing down his chiseled chin, slowly coursing over the taut skin of his ivory neck, starkly contrasting scarlet from the midnight black of his shirt, ice blue of his eyes. Those eyes that are shot to the brim with disgrace. "I am not Stefan," he snarls, lips curling over fangs, revealing pointed instruments of killing to her vision, watching her quake ever so slightly beneath his stare. "Stop trying to turn me into him."

[the reckoning]

"I wouldn't have done it for you," he tells Katherine, night air greedily licking his skin, astonished disbelief tattoo slapped on her face.

[-]

IV drips, lines of swimming blood into test tubes and plastic holders, draining the life force from her body, and he yanks them one by one, gentle air aside, scoops her into his arms, her heat flaming upon his bone white skin, like a golden fire lit from inside and underneath all around, all encompassing. For once he feels like he finally lives up to his namesake. Salvatore. As in savior.

[-]

"I promise you, I will never leave you again."

[smells like teen spirit]

"No one's gonna hurt you, especially not my brother," he whispers, hot flits of breath streaming across her ear, tickling her senses as he feels the warm, supple skin of her flesh, searching for a beating heart that thunders so loudly against his own.

[-]

Out of the corner of his eye, he spies Elena and his brother leaned up upon a tree in that John Hughes high school position with Stefan's hand above her head in a way that he is sure his brother doesn't even realize still makes him appear gentle and welcoming. Stefan's eyes are flashing in a way that gives Damon the creeps, brings his blood to a boil until he gets wind of the fact that she is uncomfortable watching his little flirting with Barbie Klaus. He grins and turns up the charm. Jealousy is a bitch, but only when you care. It's nice to have the upper hand every once in a while.

[ghost world]

Damon never really had any friends. Even in the 1800's, all he had was the demon in a pretty dress and the brother that never loved enough for him to grab a foothold on. Today he has a pseudo family that smoke and mirror as friends, but the difference is that family has to stick with you no matter what, under any and all circumstances, but he really only has one friend. Ric doesn't have to be with him, but he wants to.

[ordinary people]

"We both know you care what she thinks," the ripper says, sloshing whiskey between his lips, licking the fangs that protrude in an ugly fashion. A smirk so sinister slapped across his face, and Damon wishes that his baby brother wasn't right.

[-]

Beneath the late night sky, hands behind his head on her egg-shell white sheets, whispers of the day fading out in hot whisps in the valley of her goose down pillows, they speak softly and recklessly of hope, redemption they pray is coming. And he receives forgiveness that he isn't sure he deserves until she grants it with the triangle of her fingers, brought together by a love she isn't sure of yet cannot control.

"I'm not mad at you for letting him out," Elena says, the words laying ground on her comforter in the inky brightness of her bedroom. "I think that you're going to be the one to save him from himself. It won't be because he loves me, it'll be because he loves you," she exhales, disappointment for herself evident in her amber eyes and adoration for Damon laced within. She slowly droops her orbs closed, cherry mouth just inches from his. Sleep comes quickly for the first time in a long while with the rhythm of her rising and falling chest and the soft sweep of her chestnut reams of hair tangled in the barest part of his hands.

[homecoming]

"Do you trust me?" he inquires, steady grin already pulling at the cuts in his cheeks anticipating her answer.

"Yes." It's resounding and affirming; he can feel his humanity gloating with pride.

[-]

Their entire plan goes to hell in a handbasket, leaving demons and devils and hades to wreak ruin on the earth, forgetting life as it just lays aside, cast away. He drinks and drinks and yells and yell and curses and curses his brother and Klaus and a world that he never planned on living in in the first place except for a forgotten oath to his baby brother that Stefan knew he would never been able to break. Being a man is worthless when he has nothing to give himself for.

Wrapping her hands around his neck, she leans forward, attempting to reason, to pull forth something, anything as resolution. "We'll survive this. We always survive. Trust me," she tells him, eyes earnest and alive and beating in a way that his never will. Cold, lifeless, heartbroken.

"We're never getting Stefan back." And it rings out frigid and true causing all the ice to cement its fervor. Elena pleads, implores him, begs to let his brother go. Forget. What she doesn't know is that of any and all things he had been counting in his favor, it was over a century and a half of him and Stefan, fighting like dogs, but still sacrificing the world for each other. It's strange to be a foreigner without a destination or company. Elena may love his brother, but never in the sense that Damon will.

(He'll not ever know nor understand how he continues to live. Stefan spends an eternity keeping it from him.)

[the new deal]

Bar room banter with a gorgeous girl helps ease the pain that his baby brother is the biggest douche to walk the earth.

[-]

He jabs a piece of mossy oak into his brother's stomach, kicking his feet and screaming at him the whole while, like their children that don't want to share toys. Stefan's eyes are livid pissed, and Damon can barely hear what he is shouting through the throttling blood pumping in a loud discourse through his ear drums. The sky is white and the trees are vibrant green, brilliantly contrasting when Stefan's voice concluding reaches his ears. "I did it to save you!" Spouts off the explanation that Damon doesn't want to accept because that means even in his darkest roots, Stefan gets to be the hero. Damn him.

[-]

Elena and Ric command him by the guilt of love and trust to compel Jeremy to leave town. He watches the cracks of tears cut reams in her sandalwood skin and tries to make her understand that she's being the best sister a sixteen year old rebellious idiot could've ever asked for. Endings are tough, that he gets, but worse are the endings without a string.

She thanks him, misty eyes weak and frail. "I don't know what I'd do if you weren't here," she prays. And then he ruins it with a bang, watches it all crumble before him because even as the bad guy, his baby brother is always going to be better than him.

"He saved Klaus to save me," Damon says, not meeting her eyes, a wave of horrid conscience wiping over him. "I didn't want to feel guilty anymore."

"Wait guilty for what?" she asks, even though the swipe of coral pink color in her face betrays the steady beat in her chest and his, she knows what to expect, what he is going to tell.

His hands, cup the heart of her face as he so quietly with the world observing, all on display, "For wanting what I want." She objects so much like a church mouse, the lyrics faltering on her tongue that he almost pitches forward, until his humanity reigns him back in. "Believe me. I get it, brother's girl and all." Tight smile evenly wracked in the valley of his face. Turning a blind eye to her figure, he becomes a bigger man, resists temptation and stamps on the devil's playground, running off, until he lightly hears the catch in her breath.

"No. No you know what, if I'm going to feel guilty about something, then I'm going to feel guilty about this." And he kisses her with all the pent up feeling of a man who has never had a drop of water but finds the whole pool at once and leans into it, happy to drown if this is how he is going to die. The way his hands engulf her face, sweetly slope into the crane of her neck, tasting tea and honey and mint on her tongue, he learns how to breathe again, feels a hummingbird in his ribcage, dying to get out. It's like overdosing on a drug he had cautiously piddled in and restrained from for more time than he cared to imagine. The sensation is unbearable, and he cannot live without more. Satan wins and he pays no mind to it.

[our town]

His cell goes dead with the notes of his little brother's desperation hanging in the lines across town as he angrily jabs the button and stomps motorcycle combat boots all the way to Klaus. Tossing him in a room and spitting out accusations of crazy and insane notions, the hybrid original defeats him with one sentence, silencing any and all notions that were just swimming through crackpot plans and procedures in his mind.

"Crazy or not, that kind of love never dies," he quips, wolfish grin consuming his face whole, eating up into the wrinkles under his stormy grey eyes. Damon feels sick thinking of any and every worst possibility that the woman he loves, needs, lives for cannot revoke nor return.

[-]

The pads of his fingers gently feel the smooth skin of her chin, trace the outline of the perfect symmetry of her jaw as she bores her amber eyes into his own ice blue ones and declares a truth that he finds ridiculous, but already knows and understands. "You can't kiss me again."

He nods. "I know."

She shakes her head, sending chestnut reams of hair swiftly carried on a fall breeze. "I can't. It's not right," she says, ducking her face, shielding herself.

He admires her, memorizes the planes of her cheeks, the tiny scar above her left eyebrow, the fire hidden deep in those eyes, the delicate sandalwood skin. "No, it's right," he replies, carefully peering at her face under long spider webbed lashes. Licking his lips, he moves forward, pushing his forehead to hers, "It's just not right now."

[the tie that binds]

Bonnie inquires as to why they are acting to squirrelly like, and he tells her, smile struck across his face in glee. "We kissed. Now it's weird," he snarks quickly like it ain't no big thing. Bonnie chokes back a chuckle; he can see it on her mouth.

[-]

Stefan's palm on his face wakes him up, but only enough to realize that his brother's show is a lot better than he figured. His cheek stings and he can feel the bones slowly rearranging themselves back to normal position, the guilt eats away like an acidic ulcer. Sainthood is behind him now.

[bringing out the dead]

Ironically enough, he and baby bro attend dinner at Casa Mikaelson with little to none unexpected grief or trouble. Sure there's the whole fake truce and the punching, kicking, screaming, fighting part of Stefan and Klaus that ruins the entire evening and a fine bottle of Pinot, but the one curveball is Elijah's unassuming comment about Elena that sparks a trifling debate at the dinner table. They are the biggest, baddest assholes in the universe and yet they find something so petty as downgrading him, Stefan, and her to a love triangle?

The more he thinks about it, the more sense it makes. It always comes down to the love of a woman to send the universe off its axis.

[-]

He almost socks Klaus right in the nose when he leans forward on his stupidly comfy oxblood red dining chair and informs the brothers Salvatore that they are the last thing that a sweet, innocent young thing such as Elena needs near her in any shape, form, or intensity. Grinding his jaw, Damon meets his brother's glass bottle eyes and almost knocks him back to 1864 when he sees Stefan give a stiff nod of acceptance. My how the mighty have fallen in trepidation.

[-]

They leave miraculously unscathed except for that short minute that Klaus got a bit ahead of his temper and tried to barbeque Stefan. The woods are quiet and misty, crackling with life all around as they, the living dead, walk with heavy weighted foot marks fading the second they touch the soil. Cold air hangs between them, understood silence and bitten off gratitude the other is too stubborn to give or accept. Her name dangles precariously like a lead balloon on both of their shoulders. Damon whirls to face his brother head on, and loses footing with what comes out of his blood stained lips.

He looks so much younger, so much like the eternal teenager he is cursed to forever be. Eyes mopey and brooding, a cut of sincerity that makes Damon's heart ache because Jesus, he will always, always look at him like that when he is about to tell the truth that he already knows of. "I love her, Damon," his baby brother confesses, his bottle green eyes resting carefully, cautiously on Damon's own ice blue, cracking fissures wider.

However, he is not so gentle, not so sweet. Rather Damon squares his jaw, directs his gaze on the only constant thing he's loved and hated since before time forgetting that time forgot. "So do I." And checkmate.

[dangerous liasons]

He's not one for fairytales, never has been. Could have something to do with the fact that he's a man, but that's probably not it; more than like it's the fact that he once gave everything for love, sacrificed it all and was rewarded with eternal damnation. Still, that evening when she glides in the foyer, every man in the room stops to save her a glance, and he cannot blame them with her hair in loose springy curls sliding down her naked sandalwood skin, kissing the column of her neck; amber eyes coyly playing, smiling with ease, mouth dressed with zinfandel pink that he is already drunk upon without even tasting. He imagines her the princess. If only he were worthy to be her prince.

[-]

She doesn't deny him a waltz, in fact, she saves the first one for him and him alone. Together they glide in fluttering silence around the hardwood floor, the bottom of her ball gown dancing with the leg of his trousers, hands clasped so tightly that her heat warms his palms, gives them tingling vivacity, awakens and stirs him to the here and now where he gets to be the charming and she gets to be the beauty.

"You look stunning, if it isn't obvious," he avoids her amber eyes, his words languidly rolling off his tongue in embarrassment as she reduces him to a pile of well dressed ash with one flick of her vision.

"Thank you," she replies, and it's shy and polite, reserved and yet has the bubbling burst of affection under the surface of all the things they tend to leave unsaid.

[-]

They fight the way they always do: loudly, without regret, passionately so much that their hands fly up wildly gesticulating, his eyes pop out of his head, she thrashes her hair in an insane tornado of delicate brunette locks. And they yell, scream, insult at the top of their lung with as much quiet naivety as they can muster.

"I'm mad at you because I love you," he snarls, baring his teeth and pushing her bronzed shoulder, knocking her equilibrium. He's played and lost more times than he has won but that hasn't stopped him from coming back strong as ever, prepared to take her down. However, you see, the problem is that all she has is truth, and it's truth that he cannot bear, cannot take, does not wish to hear.

"Well, maybe that's the problem." She swallows, purses her tipsy zinfandel mouth and the whole world listens as his feet carry him swaggering with rage out of the house and with a bang into the front lawn, stomping grass and tearing at stars and cursing the moon and his humanity that brings him no release, no salvation, nothing at all.

[-]

He fucks Rebekah with his eyes shut, calls out Elena's name.

[all my children]

He tries with little visible results to not be pleased when he sees that she is jealous and pissed off the moment that she sees the evil blood slut leaving in a self-exiled walk of shame. Tries being the operative word.

[-]

When he and his baby bro come to a stalemate accord over the wining and dining of the doppelganger, Damon can see that either of them is lying through their teeth and that their game faces totally suck. There is something so incredibly wrong about the fact that a woman turns them inside out and upside down with just beat from her crimson heart. It's a dark seeded mystery boiled within memory and wish. The kettle is the identical color of the pot.

[-]

Stefan gives a brief jerk of thanksgiving because even though he pretended to be the villain, that's all it ever was. It was an act, a faux performance, pretend. His baby brother has never been anything but brooding and exhausting and an intolerable martyr in love with the doppelganger beauty with the amber eyes and sandalwood skin that sends the world radiating at her composure. This is not Damon's place to have. And his little brother is not so easy to fool either.

"You know you're not fooling anyone either. You still love her, Damon," he tells him with wavering certainty, wobbling vowels leaving his bee stung lips.

Damon smirks. "I do. I thought I could win her from you fair and square. She didn't want me. It's for the best, I'm better at being the bad guy anyway." His smile wins, his eyes lie, and Stefan is none the wiser because if either of them is the savior, then they are already living in hell.

[1912]

"I'm mean, you hate me, the earth is back on its axis," he drones, rolling his crystal eyes and pretending that every inch she steps away isn't making him crazy. His fingers cracks bone upon bone upon muscle and then skin, and he feels them heal quickly with a rush of blinding pain.

"You know if you keep pushing people away, you're going to end up alone," she replies, stalking off, ponytail bouncing from the nape of her neck, venom laced within her letters. And only when she is far enough gone that he lets out the heavy breath he's been keeping in. Damon sucks at lying to Elena when her back is turned.

[-]

In the deep honeyed night, Elena sits with her dopey ex boyfriend and his stupidly bitter words that Damon never hears, but she understands how he would cling to them without reproach, hope, or blessing. "I can't shake him," she curses, the notes falling out of her mouth like changing leaves on an oak tree in the fall. Everything must go, run its natural course.

[break on through]

Sage accused him of holding out for someone, and he bald face scorns her hope, tossing it aside and dancing on it with glee. Until he realizes they are caravanning in the same wagon to desperation and heartache.

[the murder of one]

That dream is one of the worse experiences he's ever had, which is saying a lot because it was a dream. Rebekah dangles the promise of someone coming to his rescue, then fine, but he expects a little more creativity from her to be fair. When he wakes up, blood still dripping from his open wounds, crusting into the sleeves of his indigo collar, resting on the band of his jeans, slopping on his motorcycle boots, and the girl no where to be found, he wishes he could be dead if that was what heaven is really like. Even if it isn't real, or is it where he'd be going.

[-]

He barely hears the words out of his baby brother's mouth, ringed hand poised on the antiqued door handle to leave the boarding house, tiniest whispers of their conversation flutter out Stefan's window and land at his feet.

"Look me in the eye, and tell me that you don't have feelings for him," Stefan sighs, and Damon can imagine his bottle green eyes all scrunched at the top of a furrowed brow, brooding and hoping he isn't giving it all away.

She gulps, and he catches it all the way from two stories below. She's nervous. "I don't know what I feel." Upstairs his little brother's feet make hard slams on the staircase, but his heart lightens at the hesitation in her voice, the warbling words coming out in uncertain tones.

[heart of darkness]

She's lying on her side, sleek mane of chestnut languished over the cheap, short stay motel pillow, her amber eyes darkened when she rests her gaze on him, trailing every length of his bare ivory chest, long lean legs kicked back lazily, raven locks of hair painstakingly mussed with the tips of his ever capable fingers, ice fissured orbs locked on her in kind, flickering flame dancing on the rims. Like a jungle cat, he slinks in hushed velvet noise, lifts one long leg over the other, glides into the creaky bed on top of the cream colored sheets next to her. It is silent, and she is the first to speak.

"Why don't you let people see the good in you?" she asks, smiling into her hands, letters like a warm honeyed tea wrapping around him in comfort.

He shifts so slightly, moving the mattresses enough to make the smallest peeps, but not enough to disturb. "Because when people see good, they expect good," he tells her, voice level, turning his neck to face her head on, "And I don't want to live up to anyone's expectations." Their hands find the others, intermingle in a wild and desperate dance for affection, clasping together unevenly like they weren't made to fit there, rather to go haphazardly with blindness and faithful prayer. And with that she flees with her hair in a messy cape behind her, door swinging in the Denver air.

"Elena," he breathes, and he is aware of her every hitch in her heartbeat, the way her inhaling and exhaling is off count, how much her pulse has ticked, the way she stands in defense because this wasn't supposed to happen. She never planned for it, never thought of it, never wanted it. Or at least she never meant to. And with one rapid whirl like spitfire, she launches herself into his arms, locks her legs in a deadbolt around his hips, rams her tongue in sweet mannered frenzy into his mouth, chasms her lips over his and begs, pleads for more, more, more. Sucking gently the column of her neck, pads of his fingers and hands tasting the fragrant sandalwood skin, bursts of pleasured moans expelling with pent up force from her mouth, he drinks her in like a man dying of thirst.

It happens quickly instantaneously, filling him to the brim, emptying all he has at once, landing sucker punches in every part of his body. And then the heat, the fire, the ice, the freeze ends with one passing formation in his mind just as it goes. If he dies tonight, somehow and someway, he will die happy because he_ knows_ that he _is_ loved.

[-]

Damon has not been subtle in his lifetime. So he just asks what with the trip and the kissy. Man's got a right to know. Seeing the shame in her face as he inquires stings. He never meant for this either.

"Stefan thinks I have feelings for you," Elena says, running a hand over the fresh cut adorning the brow line above her conflicted amber eyes.

"Do you?" he asks, incredulity in his own crystal blues.

The pregnant pause gives him his answer before she sputters off nonsense and meaningless words and letters that come out in ancient runes of him before a time that was now because honestly, he is not that man anymore. He's better, improved, but still him all rough edges and tumbling promises and not ever really rights, but better none the less, so no, no this is not going to be as cut and dry as she wished. He won't give her that satisfaction.

[-]

He'll never hear nor know of Rose's thoughts on him and Elena and Stefan, but Jeremy squirms the entire way back to Virginia.

[do not go gentle]

He wouldn't have gotten a gardenia corsage for the record. A gardenia's scent is quietly enveloping in its harmony, literally it stands for sweet love, which fits their bill perfectly. Damon would have chosen a tiny bundle forget me nots, striking in their blue glory neatly pinned upon her wrist, symbolizing passion in true love. When he puts it together in his head it's hardly a stretch.

[-]

Ric gives his life, doesn't complete the transition, and even though he already has a brother, he feels like he's losing another. They drink a bottle of unnamed brown liquor together, probably whiskey, his tongue is too numb to care or pass judgment, the stories of tales past, adventures had, make them sound more heroic and unimaginably forgettable than they might actually be. Like they are and were living legends in their own time. Ric has never been good at hiding anything from Damon so when that last exhale emits from his mouth, he suppresses a strangled cry in his throat, swallows it whole and pretends to walk out unscathed like his humanity isn't a big gaping hole on display for the entire blinking world. As soon as he gets out of the hallowed ground, Damon sinks to his knees, pounds his fists in the dirt, bruising and bloodying his knuckles, broken cries on his mouth. It's too hard caring too much and too hard not caring at all. Either way his heart that he doesn't have cracks when he loses Alaric Saltzman.

[before sunset]

Evil Ric is well, just plain evil. And scary. Damon wakes up on the cool tile floor of the high school, cell phone vibrating madly in his hands, groaning at the scuffed boots that appear in his eyeline.

Evilric as he has now been dubbed inside his mind, gives the brothers Salvatore a quick run down of what is going on, what with Klaus saving Elena and Caroline, but draining every last drop of blood out of her body, to the freakily twisted and warped idea of Esther's to link them together. With a final breath, he gives them the instructions. "You two better get to doing what you do best : protecting Elena," and even though his ex-best friend is a total sociopath physco killer that can't die, he is right.

[-]

They save her, as they always do, with unequal footing and loads of mishaps and nothing going according to the plan that they threw together twenty minutes beforehand. And on the ride to the deep blue sea, victory in their backseat and something that feels like hope and circumstance on the horizon, the one, of many if he's being as honest as he ever could be, isn't resolved without solution or answer because they cannot give a response or a reply that is in kin with what their heart doesn't know.

"What do we do when Elena makes her decision?"

It's a proverbially messed up coin toss of a situation cause either way it goes, he loses something : Stefan or Elena or both. Crinkling is brow, avoiding those bottle green orbs that belong to his little bro, he says what they're both thinking, have been since last fall, "All this for one girl."

Stefan chuckles, the chortles stuck in his throat, "She's a pretty special girl."

And Damon can hear himself from months past, lies sweet between his teeth like candied maples and all the truths like bitter poisoned dressed to kill, skillfully avoided with one that stings like hell and burns something fierce. _Doesn't it always come down to the love of a woman? _So he rests his forehead lazily on the side of the seat, "Yeah, she is," the growing smile twitching at the lines of his cheeks.

[the departed]

He's got about a hundred or so odd miles between him and Mystic Falls, a beef jerkified hybrid dick in a coffin in his backseat, and connected through the lines of wires of phone, he can see Stefan's furrowed brow, hear Elena's sigh at his insistence, because they are not going to get screwed over again. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me and my dumbass excuse for a little brother and the girl I'm in love with. Stefan loves to preach about free will and making your own decisions and not having to bow in court to some original family, and yet here they are once more. He slams his finger on the end button, curses flying out his mouth as he crosses the Virginia state line.

[-]

Somewhere in the deepest root of the south, she feels her heart shatter right down the middle the moment that Stefan kisses her so hard that she forgets her own name and everything written on the imprints of her soul. Closing her amber eyes and trying to remembering how to breathe, Elena chokes on her humanity and feels her world get bigger than she needs. A simple girl of eighteen shouldn't want for so much, so big all before she has even begun to live her life, but she loves fiercely and blindly and recklessly in a way that makes her shamed of herself and gives her all the hope that no one ever had before she. It is in this love that she drowns and does not want to be saved, for what better than to die so adored and consumed by emotion and besotted beyond any and all reasonable doubt?

[-]

Ric slams the silvered stake into Klaus' chest, watches him erupt into flame, and the look on Rebekah's face about breaks him. And then he realizes that he only has so much time to kill, to spend, to cherish.

He has a little brother that he hates and spits upon and sometimes wishes he could throttle, but for every lie and deceit and curse that has come out of Stefan's mouth, there have been equal measures of confessions of truths, proclamations of dignity, brutal honesty that cuts to the bone and makes his tongue go dry. For all the bad has always been outweighed by the good. Damon will never see heaven, never know the touch of sweet release, Christ, he'd be lucky if he makes it to purgatory, but baby bro will go straight up before his feet even touch the ground. But know his almighty martyr that his brother is, he would wage a war against all the devils in hell that Stefan and him will not be separated in death, even if they spend the universe rotting away in the darkest of hades because it will take something bigger than God to break them.

He also has a girl that he loathes and curses and sends every last seam in the nerves of his body on end. She makes his life difficult and terrifying and a constant threat to the world that he is trying to live amongst, but without her, he'd still be a monster, not a man. Elena makes him better, gives him faith in something, someone that he can never not forgive even if they were to cut out his tongue on her behalf. He will still stand on the altar and sacrifice everything and anything, and if he has to be separated from her, he thinks without unreasonable doubt that he could do, stave off and give her all the freedom to reign this godforsaken rued land. He just doesn't want to.

[-]

Slowly, languidly punching the number he has engraved in his fingertips, he spells the news to his baby brother, hearing the fright in the way his octave twitches up, can tell his body has tensed, all the muscles spasming in the worst of ways that Stefan hides too well from everyone else but him. Stefan clears his throat, "An hour isn't enough time to get you back to Mystic Falls," he tells him, letters catching in his mouth, garbling the words.

Damon almost laughs at the absurdity of the situation, "For our epic goodbye?" He cackles, the rough sounds like sandpaper on his lips, glad that his brother cannot see the oceans in his lurid blue orbs. But still he knows him all too much, too surely.

"No, brother. For you and Elena's."

Even though Stefan can't see him, the way his posture slumps, how his limbs lay uselessly at his side in preparation, he squares his shoulders, tries to remember those bottle green eyes, the super hero haircut, unassuming smirk, and perpetually scrunched up eyebrows in concentration and faux bravado. "Guess you'll just have to say goodbye for the both of us," Damon tells his younger brother, the reality settling, yolking upon his chest, suffocating before he even has a chance to recall how to inhale.

[-]

In the midst of a young Virginia night, Elena picks up her phone, dials a number she memorized without even understanding why, and delivers a love letter to the wrong Salvatore.

(She doesn't realize it until her lungs are filled to the brim with lake water, strands of hair swirling out in wicked directions, and the last words on her bee stung cherub lips are his name.)

[-]

The instant he answers the phone, he cracks a joke that neither of them find amusing, pretends to wipe it off his jacket sleeves and braces himself. "So since I'm possibly a dead man, can I ask you a question?" he asks, leaning into the phone imagining her amber eyes and sandalwood skin and chestnut hair, the way she moved him, the way he changed her, and prays to a God that doesn't care.

"Yeah of course," the angel answers. He can practically see her nodding her head, all the streams of chestnut flying out around her.

"If it was just down to him and me, and you had to make a choice, who got the goodbye?" he smirks involuntarily, sadly the corners of his face downturned. "Who would it be?" In honor of his execution, he closes his eyes, ducks his head, twists the ring around his middle finger one time for good faith. Death never has a hand so harsh as this, he thinks of the girl and his brother and cannot even be upset because he loves too much, too swift, too fast, too deep. Ironic, isn't it.

"I love him, Damon. He came into my life at a time when I needed someone, and I fell for him instantly. No matter what I feel for you, I never unfell for him," she half whispers, half demands. He bows in defeat.

"Hey I get it," he says, "It's Stefan. It's always going to be Stefan."

"I can't think about always. I can only think about right now," she gasps, he can imagine the tears cutting tracks in her face, spoiling her perfect skin, and even though he wants to hate her, all he think is how beautiful she is when she cries. "I care about you, Damon, which is why I have to let you go. Maybe if you and I had met first." It comes out in a sob and then dead air.

He whispers, knowing somehow she can still hear him, "Yeah, maybe." And then he smiles.

"You're going to fine. I'm going to see you soon," she chokes, the tears sopping into her mouth, dying on her coral lips. Behind him the ground shifts, the weight becomes unbalanced, the world tilts on its axis. Ric.

"Goodbye Elena." He never really gave much thought to dying because there was always a nick of time kind of situation that they were up against, them versus the world with the win almost always in their grasp. No fear. Until now. This is was defeat sounds like, looks like, feels like the ghost of his best friend with splinters of wood scraping what is left of his once beating heart. This feels like death and it doesn't look like a man at all.

[-]

This is what he never tells. He met Elena first one warm late summer night. He instantly mistook her for Katherine, but the moment she opened her mouth, shot out a few lines, spun him off his feet, and waggled her finger, he followed. She made the laugh lines deeper in the cut of his jaw, the lurid blue of his eyes haunt more, tickled the ripe flesh of his lips into begging for something more than the blood of her veins. She was, is, young and beautiful and completely unforgettable.

"I'm sorry," he had said, admiring the swerve of her hips, the litheness of her hands, "But you just really remind me of someone. I'm Damon," and it came off his tongue whip quick like an accident.

"Not to be rude, Damon, but it's creepy that you're out here in the middle of nowhere," she had said, long seams of silk hair falling over her guarded amber eyes.

"You're one to talk," he had bantered back, enjoying their little match, "Out here in the middle of nowhere," he had waved his hands to the night air biting at the back of his neck.

She had giggled softly, he had never forgotten the sound, had pretended to act pleased when hearing it the second time as if he had never been bewitched by it before. "It's Mystic Falls. Nothing bad ever happens here." He had nodded his head, moonlight hitting his eyes just right, bringing out the silvered white centers. "I got into a fight with my boyfriend," she had finally admitted, surrendering her phone in defeat.

Damon had held up his ringed fingers in mock offense, "About what may I ask?"

Elena, as he would later come to know her, had shaken her head. "Life. Future. He's got it all mapped out," she had told him, confusion daring to strike her appled cheeks.

He had shrugged, twitched his lips, "You don't want it?"

"I don't know what I want," she had said, tilting her head, so that the hair fell across her face, highlighting her features in a way that he knew she wasn't even aware of her beauty, how she already had had him under her thumb so quickly without thinking. Like lightning.

"Well that's not true," he had replied, hands open and waiting for her to fall, maybe, hopefully. "You want what everybody wants."

She had cocked her head to the right in defiance that he had known wasn't real. "What a mysterious stranger that has all the answers?" Elena had inquired, playful mouth at the ready. Her amber eyes had flashed, lips had flirted in a slowly seductive smile that pulled him under, wiped all the breath from his lungs, and he just sank deeper without any intention of following anything but that light of hers.

Damon had laughed and laughed and laughed. If only she knew. "Well let's just say I've been around a long time. I've learned some things," he had told her, crinkling his nose in good nature, creases ticked up toward his icy blue eyes.

She had squared her shoulders. "So Damon," she had paused, sucked in a quick gasp of air, heart beat had kicked up a notch, "Tell me, what is it that I want?"

He had mulled it over for a moment, slouched forward like a hungry jungle cat about to consume a prey it desires so fully and wholly that it is almost painful to end such a fight. "You want a love that consumes you, you want passion," he had said, taking one step closer to the frightful beauty, "And adventure, and even a little danger." He had smirked when finished, tips of his ivory skin, flushing the folds of magenta fabric bundled at the elbows of her sandalwood skin.

His assurance of her wish had unnerved her, he had seen it struck upon her face, written in stars in her eyes. "So what do you want?" she had asked him, confidence resurged almost at once never to give the illusion of a weakness that she would someday bare on display like an open wound that every and all would learn to look upon with fervor and blessedness. And he had sighed, twirling his fissured crystal eyes from left to right because he never ever had asked that by someone who had truly cared nor wondered. Until it was interrupted. "It's my parents," she had said, waving at the car in the distance.

With one swoop of his long legs, he had closed the space between them, inhaling the poison of her scent and the sweet flavor of her blood on his tongue. He memorized the planes of her young face, the tone of her caramel skin, the unlikely opponent in those eyes, and the world waiting to be tasted on her coraled lip. "I want you to get everything you're looking for, but right now I want you to forget that this happened. Can't have people knowing I'm in town yet," he had commanded grimly in defeat on grace as she took on the appearance of confusion and forget and some odd emotion that had looked like desperate fevered hope. Later, but not by much, he would meet her again with a new found lust and hunger and bow at her feet not for what she was, but for what she was not.

"Goodnight Elena," he had bid her and whisked away. It was an action that he would come to never leave unattended for as long as he lived out the days of his existence. Not that he knew that yet.

[-]

Damon comes to with blood spurting out his nose, hot and sticky in contrast with his pallid skin, haggard breaths coming fast and wild, uneven in their measure. "Is that all you got?" he asks of Ric, the taste of iron on his mouth.

His former best friend kneels down next to him and growls out, "Not quite." The stake suspended in the air makes a sharp turn for what is left of Damon's heart. And he supposes that whatever is left beating hoarsely in his chest, beneath his bruised and broken ribs has all the workings of what he needs. So he fights back. And with a ringed finger to the face, Ric flies to the concrete slab of floor.

[-]

Stefan makes the hardest decision of his 162 years on earth by pulling the human from the submerged truck, cursing himself for loving a martyr when he is barely a forgiven sinner. It's the reason he loves her.

[-]

On the border of North Carolina and Virginia, Damon is shaking Alaric to life, yanking his hands over the man's throat, screaming so quietly he is sure that only the angels in heaven that deign themselves to it can hear him pray and sob. "You are not dead," he repeats over and over again, sloppy tears falling from his haunted azure orbs and landing in a silent ceremony of ended war.

[-]

The front door to the emergency room slams behind him so hard he is afraid that the glass will shatter not that he'd ever notice as his mind is one tracked right now to his little brother who has the shame and regret tattooed in a permanent message on his face, engraved in his hands, and she, the fallen queen lies prostrate on the cool, metal bed of encroaching death wakes with a start and the pain that he had felt before that crippled him, sent his spiral faster and quicker than any addiction could ever beg to plead feels strangely whole and yet terrifyingly empty.

The universe stops all its spinning. The beast in him roars in defiance of his emotions and the anger of his boiling blood, the human in him dies right alongside the woman he loves too much and his little brother that he fears he never loved enough.


End file.
